Evaluation of the impact of bioaccumulation of PAH from the marine environment on DNA integrity and oxidative stress in marine rock oyster (Saccostrea cucullata) along the Arabian sea coast

Abstract

Marine pollution due to oil spills is of great concern globally for their impact on the health of marine ecosystems. We assessed the genotoxic effects and oxidative stress due to genotoxic pollutants accumulated from the ambient marine environment in the tissues of marine rock oyster, Saccostrea cucullata along the Arabian Sea coast around Goa, India. The extent of DNA damage in S. cucullata was determined by comet assay as variation of comet parameter: mean % tail DNA along the coast with respect to that at the reference site (Tiracol, Goa, India). In addition, the oxidative stress responses of rock oysters exposed to marine pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were assessed as a function of variation in antioxidant enzyme activities such as glutathione-s-transferase (GST), catalase (CAT) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) along the coast. Spearman correlation analysis showed significant correlation between different components of PAHs (viz., 2-3-PAH, 4-6-PAH and oxy-PAH) in the tissues of the rock oysters and the antioxidant enzyme activities. The antioxidant enzyme activities in S. cucullata increased with increasing concentrations of PAHs in tissues in the following order of sampling sites: Tiracol < Arambol < Betul < Velsao. Among the PAHs, oxy-PAH was found to be most predominant in causing DNA damage in S. cucullata. These results provide an insight into environmental genotoxicity and oxidative stress induced by PAHs along the Arabian Sea coast, India.

The comet assay in animal models: From bugs to whales – (Part 1 Invertebrates)

“…Among many marine species, most of the studies were done on the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) [81-88], Mediterranean mussel (Mytilus galloprovincialis) [89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100] and bay mussel (Mytilus trossulus) [101,102] although there are studies done on several other mussels such as the Asian green mussel (Perna viridis) [103][104][105], New Zealand greenlipped mussel (Perna canaliculus) [106], brown mussel (Perna perna) [107,108] as well as the hydrothermal vent mussel (Bathymodiolus azoricus) [109]. The comet assay was also done on several other species of oysters, scallops, shells and clams, namely the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) [110][111][112][113][114], eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) [115,116], marine rock oyster (Saccostrea cucullata) [117,118], Farrer's scallop (Chlamys farreri) [119,120], grooved carpet shell (Ruditapes decussatus) [99,121,122], peppery furrow shell (Scrobicularia plana) [123][124][125], pullet carpet shell (Venerupis pullastra) [94], bean clam (Donax faba) [126], manila clam (Tapes semidecussatus) [1...…”

Impact of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Accumulation on Oyster Health

“…Oysters are especially of interest, due to their contaminant load often far exceeding their bivalve congeners (O'Connor, 2002;Leon et al, 2013;Wang and Lu, 2017;Liu et al, 2019) while displaying measurable signs of contaminant-induced stress. PAH exposure has been linked with increased antioxidant activity (Sarkar et al, 2017), altered immune system activity (Donaghy et al, 2010;Croxton et al, 2012), mutagenicity (Sarker et al, 2018), and larval abnormalities (Vignier et al, 2015) in oysters, which provide a long list of sublethal biomarkers with which to study the effects of such contaminants. Since oysters are of interest for human consumption, there are concerns over health risks due to their accumulation of toxic compounds (Hong et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2020), while the demand for the food source has been stimulating the growing oyster aquaculture industry (Botta et al, 2020).…”

The Effect of Global Warming and Acidification on PAHs Bioaccumulation in Pearl Oyster Pinctada Radiate

“…PAHs are toxic, bioactive and carcinogenic, mutagenic and ubiquitous environmental compounds composed of 2-7 fused aromatic rings derived from pyrogenic, petrogenic and biogenic sources (Ke et al 2017; Wang et al 2018;Akhbarizadeh et al 2019). These large group are different in degrees of resistance to degradation and persistence, tending to be accumulated in marine biota because of their high hydrophobic and lipophilic properties ( Leitão et al 2017; Sarkar et al, 2017;Lima et al, 2018;Akhbarizadeh et al, 2019) due to their toxicity and prevalent environmental existence and readily cumulating by biota (Neff and Anderson 1981), 16 PAHs have seen on the US EPA priority pollutant list (US EPA 2009). Phenanthrene (PHE), an important 3-ring component of crude oil and a representative from the US-EPA priority pollutant list, as a consequence of anthropological activities (US EPA, 2009), is one of the most abundant aquatic PAH.…”